Dost thou desire an Android phone in Red Passion or Oiled Bronze? Begin thy journey, brave Sir Knight, to China where you will be able to purchase the Dell Mini 3i with 3.5-inch touchscreen for a few coins of the realm.

The Mini 3i, as you’ll recall, is Dell’s first smartphone in almost half a decade and runs the Ophone platform, an Android-based system that will eventually brand most of China Mobile’s phones.

Remember the Dell Mini 3i, Dell’s China-only Android phone? Well it’s not China-only anymore.

Rumor has it that Dell will bring the Mini 3i to the U.S. in the next few months to compete with other Android phones coming down the pike from HTC, Samsung, and Motorola.

The phone, presumably still in its Chinese trade dress, felt “cheap and plasticky, like the Pre,” according our tipster. He believes it will be upgraded for the American market.

The value of venture-backed exits (which is almost entirely M&A these days) might be down about 50 percent in the third quarter, but total M&A activity (including public companies) is seeing a noticeable uptick.

We ran some numbers on Crunchbase, which keeps track of all announced acquisitions, and in the third quarter $31.8 billion worth of acquisitions were announced, double the amount from the second quarter and up fourfold from the $7.6 billion low in the fourth quarter. That number was even up 23 percent from the year before.

Can you spell “patent troll”?

Software developer SpeedTrack has filed suit against nearly two dozen major online retailers, including Amazon.com, Best Buy, Overstock.com, Nike, Costco and Dell, accusing the major online retailers of infringing some patent that supposedly covers a search mechanism customers can use to locate products on their websites.

The complaint, filed yesterday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, accuses the defendants of infringing U.S. Patent Number 5,544,360, titled “Method for accessing computer files and data, using linked categories assigned to each data file record on entry of the data file record”.

Searching for growth and better margins, Dell is expanding its enterprise IT consulting business by acquiring Perot Systems for $3.9 billion in an all-cash deal. Perot Systems is the IT consulting and integration services company founded by Ross Perot in 1988 four years after selling Electronic Data Systems to General Motors. (EDS is now part of HP, which bought it last year for $13.9 billion).

The shift to consulting services will make Dell look more like IBM (and HP). Dell has an existing services division, which will be rolled into Perot Systems. Peter Altabef, the current CEO of Perot Systems, will run the combined IT Services business. Both Dell and Perot Systems are based in Texas, which should make the combination go smoother.

Of course Gmail being down is not good news for Google’s business (directly nor indirectly), but if you’re a giant computer manufacturer directly retailing products online across the globe, I’d wager you’re a bit worse off when your website is completely unavailable.

At least for the past half hour (since 5 PM EST), Dell.com has been suffering from a serious outage. Just for your reference, the company saw sales of $12.76 billion last quarter, and that was down 22% from $16.43 billion a year ago. Rest assured every minute of downtime is costing the computer manufacturer serious money.

Update: site is back up as from 5:40 PM EST

Are the two events related and are we experiencing yet another massive DDoS attack, or is this merely coincidental?

We first broke the news about Dell releasing a smartphone exclusively for the Chinese market eight days ago. Some pieces of information on the so-called Mini 3i leaked a few days after, and today the Android device finally saw the light of day during a China Mobile event in Beijing (China Mobile is the world’s biggest phone carrier and distributes the phone in that country).

We broke the news on Dell launching a China-only cell phone on Sunday, and today major Chinese news portal 163.com reports the device is on its way: What Dell will be offering in China is an Android-powered “Ophone” called the mini3i.

China Mobile, the world’s biggest carrier, will distribute the device and plans to launch it as early as “in the middle of this month” (which could mean any day this week). China Mobile plans to establish Ophone as a new brand and sell a number of devices from different makers under it. Apart from Dell, Lenovo and another Chinese company called Dopod [CN] (aka HTC) are expected to release Ophones in the next few days.

A source with knowledge of the situation tells us that Dell is launching (or at least announcing) a mobile phone in China in the next day or two. We are trying to verify the information and gather more details on the hardware and operating system now.

Our sources on new hardware coming out of Asia tend to be spot on (we broke the news of the second and third generation Amazon Kindles, the launch of the Palm Pre and the existence of the second Palm WebOS phone and generally have good information on sales figures for iPhones, Kindles and other devices). But in this case the information we’ve received is extremely thin.

Jim Breyer, a partner at Accel Partners, joined the board of directors of Dell today. That’s interesting in itself, but the man also sits on the board of Facebook, Walmart and Marvel, as well as a number of younger startups.

On a daily basis Breyer sees a flow of non public information (retail sales at Walmart, Facebook’s monetization plans, Marvel’s thoughts on the promise and peril of digital distribution, Dell’s plans to stay relevant) that would be the envy of anyone.

I’ve long had a warm place in my heart for Breyer, who managed to defuse the absurd legal situation that arose last year when we put on an Iron Man screening. Marvel tried to shut it down for a variety of reasons. Breyer, realizing the ridiculousness of the situation, called back the attack dogs and the screening went forward. I’ve had a man crush on him ever since.

Now THAT is a low price on a 24-inch monitor. Dell Small Business is selling the S2409W for $209 after $90-worth of instant savings, plus you can use coupon code 1Z829VM32T983V to knock another 10% off, bringing the final price to $188.10 after the dust settles.

The monitor has a 1920×1080 resolution (16:9), DVI/HDMI/VGA connections, 1000:1 contrast ratio, 300 cd/m2 brightness, and 5ms response time. No built-in speakers but, hey, it’s $188 — free shipping, too.

UPDATE – Coupon code is dead.

Last week, a blog post hit Techmeme detailing how Dell had screwed up by not securing Adamo.com for its ultra-thin notebook, which CrunchGear’s John Biggs spotted at SXSW a day before its official release on March 17.

It’s not like they tried: the former owner of the domain name, Tucows subsidiary YummyNames has no record of ever even being approached for a sale or lease of the internet address. Dell claims they had a broker contact the firm anonymously, who was quickly convinced the price would be too high (yet YummyNames leases domains from $750 per month).

The computer manufacterer instead went with AdamoByDell.com but belatedly realized it wouldn’t be such a terrible idea to own or at least use Adamo.com too.

12 inch Netbooks are coming. Dell has the Inspiron Mini 12, Samsung will unveil its 12 inch netbook model to the U.S. shortly, and more are coming. And Intel isn’t happy about this at all.

In fact, the whole Netbook market may be making them nervous. Despite the fact that they power most of these devices with their new Atom chip that handles some PC chores well and uses a lot less power (so batteries are smaller and last longer). Intel sees Netbooks as devices for people who can’t afford normal laptops, or as second devices. But it’s clear that a lot of people are buying them instead of normal dual core machines, despite their very serious limitations.

That means that for the most part, every Netbook sold is one less Dual Core that Intel can sell at a higher price and higher margin. Which explains exactly why the company has been publicly criticizing the performance of the machines. “If you’ve ever used a Netbook and used a 10-inch screen size–it’s fine for an hour. It’s not something you’re going to use day in and day out,” said Intel VP Stu Pann at an event last year.

Online holiday sales deflated 3 percent this year. ComScore estimates that holiday sales in the U.S. totaled $25.5 billion between November 1 and December 23, the last day orders could be delivered in time for Christmas. The comparable total in 2007 was $26.3 billion.

Sales were struggling to keep up with last year’s totals all holiday season. In the end, they fell short. (Hitwise comes to the same conclusion).

This has been a brutal month or so for tech layoffs. According to our Layoff Tracker, there have been 19,683 job eliminations at tech companies announced since mid-September, and we’re not even counting the 24,600 people at Hewlett-Packard who are being eliminated as a result of its merger with EDS.

But only five big companies make up more than 90 percent of the layoffs: Xerox (3,000), Dell (8,900), Yahoo (1,500), eBay (1,500), and German chipmaker Qimonda (3,000). The other 33 companies are mostly startups, and collectively account for 1,683 layoffs. Although three more companies (Sony Ericsson, Nvidia, and TicketMaster) account for an additional 1,110 job losses.

After stripping those out, you get closer to a pure number of layoffs at tech startups: 573

In a move that could start a new wave in PC sales, Dell and Paramount Pictures today announced that they have signed a joint venture that will see “Iron Man” come pre-loaded on Dell computers for anyone who wishes to order the unit.

So far, the details of the deal are a bit disappointing. Paramount is the only studio that has signed on and “Iron Man” is the only film being offered. Dell claims that more titles will eventually be offered during the purchase process, but for now, it looks like Dell and the studios have a “wait and see” attitude to decide if they want to move forward with a broader strategy.

Online file storage and sharing service Box.net is helping to put the “cloud” in Dell’s first netbook, the Inspiron Mini 9.

With only 4GB of built-in hard drive space, Dell needed some way to boost capacity. So it placed a default Box icon on the desktop that leads to 2GB of free internet storage (twice the normal 1GB that Box provides for free).